The Clean and Green Club, January 2022

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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip: January 2022

Correction

Oops. The second sentence of the December main article should have read “Animals breathe oxygen in and breathe out carbon dioxide, which plants breathe in and convert back to oxygen.” Thanks to sharp-eyed reader Julie Takatsch for spotting the error. I had written “monoxide,” and neither I nor my assistant caught it. This is why people say you should always have someone else proofread your stuff–because often, you will read what should be there, and not necessarily what actually is written.

Greyston’s Hiring Slashes Cost, Brings Jobs

U.S. Army photos by Bryan Williams, licensed under Creative Commons

Maybe you’ve heard of Greyston Bakery, brownie baker for Ben & Jerry’s, Whole Foods, and some fancy NYC hotels. I’ve been a long-time fan of Greyston’s open hiring model for years, and have written about them several times, including a brief profile in my 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World.At Greyston, you put your name and contact info on a list, and when you’re next on the list (typically about six months), you’re hired as an apprentice. It doesn’t matter what your past looks like. You could be an ex-addict, ex-mental patient, ex-felon, ex-welfare parent, ex-unhoused person…as long as you’re willing to get trained, show up when you’re supposed to, and do the work.

When I’ve written about the company, I’ve focused on the good they do in the community by hiring people widely considered unemployable. But recently, I listened to Greyston CEO Joseph Kenner discuss the bottom-line business advantages of open hiring.

Kenner pointed out that open hiring lowers costs and time while massively boosting employee loyalty. But Greyston maintains high standards for the work output, and terminate employees who don’t work out—and they have a social worker on premises to help these often-first-time employees adjust to the environment (and cope with whatever problems they’re facing outside the workplace). They partnered with a North Carolina distribution center for The Body Shop that saw open hiring slash turnover by 60 percent and boost productivity 13 percent. When they rolled it out to the whole company, they reduced turnover 63 percent in the US/17 percent in Canada and saw a massive increase in employees switching from seasonal to permanent (24 percent in the US and 50 percent in Canada).

These numbers are huge, and will eventually percolate up into much larger corporations, because not to do so is leaving a big chunk of money on the table. And Kenner says that if just 40,000 open-hiring jobs are created in the US, we will see a $3 bn positive impact without any government involvement. Think of the impact if 1,000,000 ex-addicts, ex-mental patients, ex-felons, ex-welfare parents, ex-unhoused entered the workforce, received the training they need to succeed, and went from depending on the state and social service agencies to productive, employed, heads of households that can stay together!

Then he brought on two co-panelists from companies that have partnered with Greyston to implement the model. Addressing a room of CEOs, one asked who would interview someone who had vastly increased revenue at software and media companies—and who would interview a pimp/drug dealer who read at a 5th-grade level. The show of hands was what you’d expect. Then he said, “They’re the same person. I am both of those.” He pointed out that Bernie Madoff and the Enron guys had terrific resumes.

The other panelist talked about where it makes sense to use the model and where it doesn’t. He looks at resumes when hiring senior managers and C-suite execs, but is happy to do open hiring for line employees. Right now, about ¼ of his ~200 employees came on through open hiring.

This is really validating for the view I’ve been promoting that doing the right thing is GREAT for business—that they can build social change and environmental healing not just into philanthropy but into core products, services, missions, policies, etc. I’ve been singing this particular song for almost 20 years now.

Discover why Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield, futurist Seth Godin, and many others recommend Shel’s 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World (and download a free sampler). Autographed and inscribed copies available.

I’ve gotten quite a bit of media coverage recently, though only the first two links are about green and social justice business practices. But hey, I’m eclectic ;-).Share2Seed quotes me in a long piece about how Elon Musk has made it more OK to be a successful eco-entrepreneur https://medium.com/@Share2Seed/how-to-be-an-ecopreneur-and-get-paid-well-like-elon-musk-463a0e3eaed7

They seem like an interesting support venture for eco-businesses; after you read the article you might want to visit their home page.

Included in this roundup story about making seasonal businesses more sustainable. https://www.incfile.com/blog/how-to-make-seasonal-business-sustainable

Profiled in this article about how I as a rural business owner and activist use broadband. https://www.explorebeyond.org/stories/broadband-powers-entrepreneurship-in-rural-new-england/

I presented a brief gallery talk on the stunning posthumous show of my stepfather, Michihiro Yoshida, a painter whose bright colors and surrealistic images earned him the title, “The Mythic Modernist.” His site is http://artbyyoshi.com, and the slide talk is at https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/3qKcWmG8nEb8FMYIHTpf8AVYILof-xfJtxP5MfxKEQegkkhcTlZwHCDbyGKxBuhH.-9D0QrXxeZDB4lZi Passcode: BtAUz?Y3 (the presentation starts at 2 minutes, eight seconds into the video).

My tips on traveling like a local lead off this article on traveling internationally for newbies: https://arreh.com/planning-a-trip-heres-what-you-need-to-know-10-pieces-of-advice-for-new-travelers/

View highlights from (and listen to) more than 30 podcasts ranging from 5 minutes to a full hour. Click here to see descriptions and replay links.

Holonomics

Holonomics: Business Where People and Planet Matter by Simon Robinson and Maria Moraes Robinson

Holonomics is a portmanteau of Holistic Economics. The central metaphor reminds that every part of a plant knows how to grow a whole plant; the whole is embodied in every leaf, stem, and root. And similarly, any piece of a broken hologram contains the entire original image, in miniature.

This was a challenging book for me to get through. With its long digressions (into the poet Goethe’s mathematics and plant science, among other things), wandering writing style, and gems of wisdom buried in the long riffs, I found myself picking it up, reading a few pages, putting it down for a few weeks, taking it on trips and reading 30 or 50 pages, and finally giving it a long push and finishing in December what I started in August.

But it was worth the slog because this book offers lots of those gems. Here are a few:

  • For maximum results, co-create your products, services, and processes with your customers (p. 27).
  • Holonomic thinking combines mental, systems, and business models to see the whole picture of complex systems (p. 33, p. 37).
  • Studying the thinking processes of scientists and watching their consensus shift over time provides great insight; scientists often tend to marginalize creative thinkers, but these outliers create much of the real progress once their ideas gain acceptance (p. 45).
  • Be careful of ambiguous language: do you mean “normal” as in what usually happens, or “normal” as a social behavior pattern? (p. 66)
  • Plants are always reinventing themselves. It’s about the becoming, the process, adapting to their changing environment (pp. 74-75).
  • Gregory Bateson: Our problems result from the difference between how nature works and how people think (p. 93).
  • Looking at how a species organizes itself internally can tell you a lot. Mice, in constant fear of predators, focus on their nervous systems, while bison, big enough not to fear many predators, are organized around digestion (p. 116).
  • We are not the only species that can engineer our environment. Certain types of termite mounds have the equivalents of heat, air conditioning, and gardens—but only when the community reaches critical mass and gets “excited”; as individuals, termites don’t build those things (pp. 135-137).
  • The new science of complexity studies has a lot to teach us about what happens when individual actions stop dominating and the community takes over—and why chaos and order (combined into “chaord” on p. 187) are both necessary (pp. 138-140); in fact, the optimum condition for adaptability is living “on the edge of chaos” (p. 142). Gaia, the entire earth, can be seen as a single giant and very complex system that self-regulates and incorporates both living and non-living elements—the more complexity, the greater stability, and the more diversity, the less chaos—but you need some chaos to avoid stagnation. Gaia has even been able to maintain appropriate temperatures for life even as the sun has gotten 25 percent brighter and despite periods of significant heating or cooling (pp. 145-150).
  • Just as nature combines collaboration and competition, so does a holonomic, eco-friendly business environment, constantly amalgamating into a whole that is much greater than the sum of its parts (pp. 156-165).
  • Valuing the earth/ecosystem has monetary benefits, too; the earth provides $33 trillion per year in services, vastly outstripping the $18 trillion human-generated world GDP (pp. 181-182).
  • It’s better to buy fewer things and use them well than to buy lots of things, just to have them (p. 220).

The final 50 pages or so are full of great case studies in the business world. Companies profiled include obvious ones like Toyota, but also many we don’t necessarily think of as holonomic: VISA, Kyocera, Nextel, the Brazilian auto service shop chain DPaschoal, and many others—with interviews of many leaders from these companies. It also lists the nine factors that make up Bhutan’s National Happiness Index (p. 223), and two amazing quotes from mythicist Joseph Campbell: “All money is congealed energy” (p. 221) and “I don’t think [a meaning for life] is what we’re really seeking…what we’re really seeking is an experience of being alive…” (p. 224).

Holonomics includes extensive endnotes, bibliography, and an index.

Connect with Shel

Turn Your Sustainability/CSR Report Into Powerful Marketing!  http://goingbeyondsustainability.com/turn-that-nobody-reads-it-csr-report-into-a-marketing-win/

About Shel

Speaker, author, and consultant Shel Horowitz of GoingBeyondSustainabiity.com helps businesses find the sweet spot at the intersections of profitability with environmental and social good — creating and marketing profitable products and services that make a direct difference on problems like hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change. His 10th book is Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World.

If you’re not already a subscriber, please visit http://goingbeyondsustainability.com and scroll to the very bottom left corner. You’ll find lots of interesting information on your way to the subscription for, too.

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1 Comment so far »

  1. Another “Hiring Unemployables” Success Story – greenandprofitable.com said,

    Wrote on January 29, 2022 @ 12:19 am

    […] or steady work history. In fact, my most recent newsletter (published less than two weeks ago) highlights a company that pioneered this and now consults with other companies on how to implement o…. That article focuses on the positive bottom-line benefits their clients experience as they hire […]

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